The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia
Andrei Lankov
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0199390037
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding.
In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible history of the nation, he turns his focus to what North Korea is, what its leadership thinks, and how its people cope with living in such an oppressive and poor place. He argues that North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. A living political fossil, it clings to existence in the face of limited resources and a zombie economy, manipulating great powers despite its weakness. Its leaders are not ideological zealots or madmen, but perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world. Even though they preside over a failed state, they have successfully used diplomacy-including nuclear threats-to extract support from other nations. But while the people in charge have been ruthless and successful in holding on to power, Lankov goes on to argue that this cannot continue forever, since the old system is slowly falling apart. In the long run, with or without reform, the regime is unsustainable. Lankov contends that reforms, if attempted, will trigger a dramatic implosion of the regime. They will not prolong its existence.
Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive.
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of an era long gone. Similar regimes either changed out of recognition or disappeared long ago and are now remembered with disdain, if at all. Meanwhile, the regime in Pyongyang still remains in full control of its country. This is a remarkable feat, especially if we take into consideration that it has to operate in a highly—and increasingly— unfavorable environment. North Korea is a small country with few resources and a moribund economy. In spite of all this, however, it has managed to survive
purely Korean—slopes of Mount Paekdu. To support these improbable claims the North Korean authorities built a “replica” of the Paekdu Secret Camp complete with a log cabin where Kim Jong Il was allegedly born, and made it a site of obligatory pilgrimage. The complete control over information flows within society, combined with isolation from the outside world, gave North Korea’s propagandists opportunities their worldwide peers could not dream of. They could successfully hide from the populace
underwent reforms of this type in 1959, 1979, and 1992. The reform scenario is well known. One day, usually in the morning, the population suddenly learns that old banknotes are to become useless in a few days, and should be swapped for new banknotes. For note exchange, strict limits are set. For cash the limits are usually equal to a couple of monthly salaries, while money in bank accounts usually is treated with greater leniency and can be exchanged in somewhat greater quantities—but still
its archenemy, Seoul’s nuclear ambitions were a well-known secret. As a result, in approximately 1975, the North Korean political leaders decided to speed up their own military nuclear program. The chief political obstacle was the position of the former Soviet Union, the major supplier of nuclear know-how. Moscow took non-proliferation seriously, and had no intention of seeing its nuclear monopoly erode—let alone creating conditions where its rogue and unruly quasi-allies would be able to provoke
Moscow and Beijing). It also worked well during the first nuclear crisis of 1990–1994. Consequently, during October 2006, North Korean leaders decided to make a point by conducting their first nuclear test. The yield was surprisingly low and it is possible that the nuclear device did not work as intended, but the underground explosion in remote northern mountains was enough to demonstrate that North Korea was indeed moving toward creating an effective nuclear weapons capability. After the test,